Happy St Patrick's Day (rerun from 2016)

Well, here we are again, March 17, St Patrick's Day.  Since I don't care for green beer or corned beef and cabbage, and I look like a lawn in green clothing, I thought I would spend the morning finding out just who Patrick was, and what he did.

Patrick (c. AD 385–461) is the foremost patron saint of Ireland.
Saint Patrick's Day has been an official religious holiday since the early 17th Century. By the way, I used to work with a woman from Ireland, and every March she recoiled in horror at the dissolute way in which Americans guzzle and gobble their way through what is, in Ireland, a very sacred religious holiday.

But that's none of my beeswax. The original point of celebrating Patrick's day was to commemorate the arrival of Christianity in Ireland and shed a light on Irish culture and the goodness of their people.  There are parades in many cities, and people wear green clothing and shamrock decorations. 

Patrick was born in Britain, in the days of the Roman occupation, and became a missionary in Ireland after being kidnapped as a teenager and taken in slavery to Gaelic Ireland.  He was a shepherd there for six years and had a dream in which God told him to flee to the coast, where he would find a ship to take him home.

He did get home and went a seminary, becoming a priest.  Later he returned to Ireland and, in his missionary work, led thousands of pagan druids to Christianity.

Remember hearing that "St Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland"?  Well, guess what?  Ireland never has had native snakes!

The legend was spun that he was in the middle of a 40-day fast and some snakes attacked him, so he chased them into the sea. What he chased away was the paganism, after all.

This legend was likely made up and spread by people who know nothing about snakes, because those of us familiar with slithering reptiles know doggone well they don't respond to being chased or even to being hollered at (no ears).

Scientists figure that it was the most recent Ice Age that froze the snakes out of Ireland.

But Patrick died on this day, March 17, 461, and is recognized for what he did do - bringing modern Christianity to a pagan land - as much as for what he didn't do - driving snakes away.  

Enjoy your day, have a good time, and be safe!

The Dentist Of The Year gets a little plaque

Lord help me, I know times have changed, and I'm not about to talk like someone from the Depression era about how when we had no food we ate old overcoats and we were GLAD to have them...but the quarter I used to get from the Tooth Fairy seems somewhat paltry now, when I look at what the kids are getting for a used bicuspid now. $7 dollars! What a nice bag of candy THAT would buy!

And, as they say, follow the money. Since 1998, Delta Dental has been running the Original Tooth Fairy Poll® as a way to see how much change the fairy has been doling out. And it turns out, if you follow the ebb and flow of parental generosity as regards lost choppers, you are also tracking the US economy, because for 17 of the past 21 years, the movement of the tooth money has followed the trend of the S&P 500.

(The 500 are the stock prices of 500 large firms that serve as a barometer of the US economy. S&P means Standard and Poor. I am certainly not Standard but I am certainly Poor.)

They make no claim that the tooth money and the stock prices are in any way connected, but it's interesting to see them track as they do:

  

One question the poll result does not answer is, why would anyone tell some stranger how much they shell out every time their kid sheds a Chiclet? Unless the kid in question had buck teeth, in which case it would be obvious: one dollar each!

 

Slice of Life

And now to add a thing to the list I call Things I Didn't Even Know Were Things...beetroot cake.

As we can surmise, beetroot is the taproot of beets, that portion  of beets that is in the ground, where it should stay. Beets are the vegetable known in North America as table beets, garden beets, red beets, or golden beets.

What they have to do with cake, I don't know. Cooks say that if you grate the root, it's quite sweet, and makes a nice cake.

Well, Betty Crocker is quite sweet, and she also makes a nice cake, and none of them looks like beets, the vegetable in the bowl that I pass by ten times out of ten.

But I came across this depressing fact about a boring vegetable being a cake ingredient while reading an article on Reuters that claims that Susan Jebb, head of Britain's Food Standards Agency (FSA), says that the practice of bringing cakes to an office to celebrate birthdays or workgroup accomplishments or the imminent departure of some unliked coworker (I have seen these!) is comparable to passive smoking.

But in the words of on English office worker, "I just don't think there's a real equivalence there. With cakes, it's up to you whether you eat it."

The belief is that having everyone in the office have a hunk o' cake is an American tradition, too. In many offices, maintaining the stash of plastic forks, paper plates, and plastic tablecovers is a sacred task, given only to the unofficial social supervisor.

Part of the debate in Jolly Olde England is, what's so wrong about a tiny piece of beetroot cake? It's a healthy choice! 

But Ms Jebb is quick to slice things another way, saying that office cake are "an example of a society that is promoting unhealthy food choices."

“If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day," Jebb told The Times newspaper. "But because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

So, let's sum up: if there is no cake to be had, she would not eat cake. 

In other news, if she had 98 more legs, she could be The Rockettes!

Ms Jebb went on to quote a report that said 25.9% of adults in England were obese and a further 37.9% were overweight, based on  a 2021 survey.

But surveys show that 100% of people facing their own imminent mortality would agree that another slice or two of cake is not such a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

"It helps build friendships. It creates a really lovely atmosphere," said British advertising strategist Bish Morgan. "As long as people are sensible and strike the right balance then yeah, I still think it's a lovely thing to do in the office."

If you're at work today and someone offers you a little slice of cake, go ahead and live it up. Milton would!

The Kids ARE Alright

I for one am tired of hearing people put high school and college-age people down. For my money, young people are just fine, and it's the adults of the world who are disappointments, like "pro-life" governors who also are big fans of child labor.

Owing to the fact that I am well into my dotage and still act like a member of a student government association or an exchange student from Mars, I look for stories that show young people in a good light, and I don't usually have to look far.

Take these three high school kids in Callisburg, Texas. They stepped up big to help out a struggling custodian.

Mr James, as he is known, retired from Callisburg High, and found himself unable to make his monthly bills, so he un-retired, and went back to work with the broom and mop in January.

The man is 80 years of age, and does not deserve to be scrubbing and waxing. So these three - two girls and a guy - set up a GoFundMe page on Feb. 15, to help the man out. 

“At first, the goal was $10,000 — and we know that $10,000 really isn’t anything these days — but we’re hoping that whatever we can get can give him a little bit more cushion,” senior Marti Yousko told local news station KTEN.

Mr James had confided in Principal Jason Hooper that his monthly rent had gone up almost $400, and he just couldn't afford it without going back to work.

 

The kids were sad to see that Mr James had had to come back to work, so soon after he had retired at the end of the last school year. In that situation, adults would have formed study groups and done surveys to find out how Mr James could stretch his money by shopping at ALDI and trying the day-old baked goods at ShopSumMor.

Kids, on the other hand, took a direct approach and said, let's do something for the man.

“When I saw him in the hall, it broke my heart,” senior Greyson Thurman said. “Nobody at that age should be working; they should be living the rest of their life, you know?”

Thurman posted a TikTok video of Mr. James on the job while he should have been home on the recliner. He labeled the video "Let's help Mr. James out!" adding, "My classmates and I hate seeing Mr. James here, no one his age should have to be cleaning our messes up to continue to live."

In one week, the GFM page brought in $279,905, and Thurman said, "He is VERY appreciative of everyone willing to give up their time to help him out and change his life. You all have shown what can happen when everyone gets together to help others!!! I think God did this to show that no matter how much evil there is good will always show it’s self! Mr. James thanks you all!! God bless yall!" 

And the adults would have been planning a bake sale and car wash for late in July.

Oscar Buzz

I have no interest in motion picture awards, but I see there was a bit of chatter online last night because a photographer took a tumble as Lady Gaga breezed past him on the "champagne carpet" (I guess they didn't want any more red, after last year's fisticuffs) at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

So the guy falls, for whatever reason, and the next thing you know, Gaga scoots over to help him get up.

As only "Entertainment Weekly" could write the story, she did so, "shimmying past others in her elegant Versace gown."

It's a sad day in our life, when one person helps another human being get up off the floor.  That is basic human decency. If I ever took a nosedive in the produce aisle, I would only hope that someone would lend a hand, getting an old man upright again.

Someone shared this video of what happened; you can hear some onlooker correctly saying that it was very nice of her to help. Then Lady G kept right on walking into the ceremony.

She is no stranger to the Oscar stage, having won in 2019 for co-writing "Shallow," from the A Star Is Born soundtrack. She was headed to the show last night to sing "Hold My Hand," her nominated song from Top Gun: Maverick. 

It seems like only yesterday, but it was in 2010 at the MTV Awards show that the singer, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, wore a dress made of beef.

In all seriousness, it's really great that she is so humble and down-to-earth as to help a person out. The sad thing is that most people, let alone most rich and famous entertainers, would not have. 

Let's give the Lady a hand!

 

 

Sunday Rerun: Through the years and the tears

 Someone had a great idea lately. I'm sure it came from all this free time so many people have had lately, with no school or work or money to fret over.

The idea was to have everyone post their senior picture on Facebook so we could show solidarity with the class of 2020, high school and college, who will not have graduation exercises and ceremonies, proms, senior trips to the beach, spring sports schedules, and yearbooks.

This present pandemic has had consequences we need not discuss here. The loss of lives, the illness, the emotional toll, all have been devastating, and add to that the economic hardships befalling millions upon millions and I said I wasn't going to get into that, so enough.

I do like the idea of posting graduation pictures. If it helps the class of 2020, I'm all for it.

 There for a while, she was in every other movie. Now she's home counting her money and planning a comeback, I hope.

 You say you're a dork? You aren't the only dork in the world. A lot of them get better hairdids and find success!

 Not every famous person has two names, but this is both Channing Tatum and Tanning Chatum.

It wasn't bad enough that this man wore a tan suit to work one day, but here he is with that Goober open collar look.

This picture of Carrie Underwood could have been taken last week for all we know. She always looks the same, which is to say, great.

America has a rich tradition of people who say they were awkward nerdy needy dorks in high school, and then they show you their picture and there's no nerd.

And then, you have high school athlete Lance Armstrong. If he told you he was annoying then, you could easily say, "And you still are!" But he'd never say that.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 11, 2023

Because of my huge shortness of information about Earth Science, I recently learned that a rainbow does not just form an arc, but actually makes a full circle in the sky. We just can't see it all, which is also a handy metaphor for how much we don't know about other people. They're making circles and we don't see it all, so wish them peace and love...

This photo from 1936 shows the neverending process of painting structures such as the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time you finish, it's time to start over again at the other end. 

My fellow Baltimore Ravens fans will appreciate the symbolism in this one, showing a raven perched atop a Saguaro cactus.  Will our team be heading into a barren stretch, or will we figure out who wants to be the quarterback to lead us back to the Super Bowl? Find out in the next installment of "Life With Lamar."

Keeping the bird theme going...here are a Northern Cardinal, a Bluejay, and a Finch out for a nice breakfast.

I have a couple of friends in Seattle so I will ask that we get input from the Pacific Northwest on this:  the caption reads "Seattle Gum Wall" and all I can think is, oh no, they don't just randomly stick their masticated Dubble Bubble all over the wall...do they? 

Here is one of 495 reminders you'll get today about turning the clock ahead tonight. And of course, on the news, you'll see senators and representatives breaking their necks to sponsor legislation banning Daylight Savings Time. Then you won't hear another word about it until Autumn.

They call it twinning, don't they? It spans the years!

They are really asking the impossible here, but I will try to revert to fetal stage, even though I didn't have a wallet at the time. I did have a watch, however.

Oh, how wonderful it is when corporations rake in huge profits and thank the workers who made all that money for them by handing them, not a life saver in the form of a decent share of the loot, but a daggone LifeSaver candy mint. Telling people they are "appreciated" in that Papyrus font really helps them pay off their debts, buy a house, feed their children....

Here's a pay stub dated 1954 from someone who worked construction for $2.50 an hour, times 40 hours, minus federal income tax and "old age benefit." Detach before cashing check.
 

If I leave here tomorrow

It was sad to see that Gary Rossington, the last surviving member of the original Lynyrd Skynyrd band, passed away on Sunday at 71.  

On the band's Facebook page, this message: "It is with our deepest sympathy and sadness that we have to advise, that we lost our brother, friend, family member, songwriter and guitarist, Gary Rossington, today. Gary is now with his Skynyrd brothers and family in heaven and playing it pretty, like he always does. Please keep Dale, Mary, Annie and the entire Rossington family in your prayers and respect the family's privacy at this difficult time."

No cause of death was given, but Rossington had cheated the cemetery several times before. If you remember the Skynyrd song "That Smell" from the 1977 "Street Survivors" album, well, that was about his car accident the year before, when his Ford Torino collided with a tree ("Oak tree, you're in my way!") Then came the plane crash later in '77 which killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, and left Rossington with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a punctured stomach and liver.

More recently, Rossington had quintuple bypass surgery in 2003, had a heart attack in 2015, and had several other heart surgeries. For the past several years, his participation with the band had been limited due to his health concerns. 

Stop me if you've heard this before, but the band's name did not come from the mention of a Leonard Skinner, who "got ptomaine poisoning last night after dinner" at Camp Grenada, in a 1963 song by comedian Allan Sherman.  

It wasn't until a decade later, 1973, that the band released their first album, "Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd" in 1973. If you fell in love with the country-blues-rock sound of LS (I did!), well, that slide guitar on the classic rock classic "Free Bird" was by Gary Rossington, who had been a student at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida. 

(For those of you not born and raised in the USA, it was, inexplicably, for several centuries a matter of pride to the side that lost the Civil War to name schools, armories, ships, and shopping malls for the leaders of the losers that fought with the rest of the United States over their right to own human beings.)

The physical education teacher at good old Robert E. Lee was a man named Leonard Skinner. If you sent out to Central Casting for a bullet-headed unreconstructed good-ole'-boy Confederate-style gym teacher, you couldn't find a more ne plus ultra example anywhere.

So conservative was he that he regularly upbraided the boys he instructed in the arts of pole vaulting, basketball, and cross-country running, reserving particular venom for guys with long hair, such as Ronnie Van Zant, Bob Burns and Gary Rossington. These three were regularly sent to the principal's office for the infraction of having hair that covered their ears and neck.

Van Zant was a singer, Burns a drummer, and Rossington played a pretty mean guitar, so when they got together and added a few other locals, they formed a band that became you-know-who.

And they took the name from the despotic gym teacher who proudly had the name LEONARD SKINNER tooled on a leather key fob he toted around. 

Mr. Skinner never cottoned to the music or the hairstyles of the band, but in later years he allowed that they were good, hard-working boys. He retired from teaching and got into into real estate, telling an interviewer later that he had no idea there was a band using that name until he heard a radio DJ introduce a song "by Lynyrd Skynyrd." 

At his death in 2010, the New York Times called him "arguably the most influential high school gym teacher in American popular culture."

Way to go

A relic from long ago is making a comeback, and no, it's not The Big Orange. It's the way people used to find their way from here to Sheboygan. 

First, we would go by the verbal directions from the guy at work who knew how to get everywhere from anywhere. You could tell he knew his way around, because he peppered his directions with such phrases as, "You stay on Rt 222 and that dumps you right onto 372" and "once you get off the back roads, you pick up 40 and you can really make time."

Classic changemaker

But once you found that his directions are no doggone good, you would stop at a gas station where the attendant, who always had a rag hanging out of one pocket and one of those changemaker things on his belt, would present you with a folded roadmap that showed you all the roads in beautiful color, and also all the locations along the way of his company's service stations ("World's Cleanest Rest Rooms").

Caution: once you unfolded that roadmap, you would never fold it up again as crisply as when you got it. Mapmakers worked around the clock to make sure of that.

A lot of it has to do with many of us yearning to hit the road again, and not necessarily wanting to be lectured by the voice on our dashboard GPS ("At the next intersection, hard left turn, and then proceed one quarter mile to your location"). It's more fun to have your co-pilot say, "Hang a louie up here and then it's just down the road a piece."

"We're seeing obviously an uptick in travel across the board. So, as we're sort of coming out of the COVID pandemic, people are really traveling more," said AAA's Ragina Ali.  AAA, the auto club, printed up a million paper maps last year to go with its "TripTik" direction planners. 

Another point to remember: having a TripTik or map with you means you don't have to worry about getting a cell signal. Who knows what kind of coverage you'll have outside of Sheboygan? 

"Don't cheat, son, but let me show you how to..."

I like to remember the old expression about "how the twig is bent, so grows the tree." I think it's the example we set - they call it "modeling" today - for the younger ones that gives them something to live up to later, or something to live down.

We present the Kelly family, out of Fernandina Beach, Florida. Their son Kannon (!?) is three, and not quite tall enough to get on the rides at Dizzyworld. They have a strict policy down at that sun-baked paradise - one must be 38" inches tall - but Kannon's parents, Ty and Haley, came up with the perfect solution. Rather than telling Kannon that he would have to wait until he was tall enough to meet the safety requirements of the attraction, they togged him out in elevator shoes, like politicians wear, for the same reason.

Not only that, but they went on Instagram and Tik Tok and Doo Dad and any other site they could find to brag a little about getting over on The Mouse.

And of course, social media residents accused the Kellys of being Kareless where Kannon was Koncerned and said they failed to meet with minimum Kwality standards for Konscientious Kare of the youth.

(OK I got it out of my system now).

The Kellys took down the video and apologized all over the place.

"We are truly sorry about the whole situation," Ty Kelly tells TODAY.com. "I want my kids to know that parents follow the rules and we are trying to raise them right. In this situation, we bent the rules and I don’t want that to be my legacy."

So work with me a minute, TikTok Ty...you want your kid to know his parents follow the rules, and you post videos of you and the missus showing him how to cheat the rules?

Howzat work?

 

I can dream, can't I?

With my birthday just 116 days away, this is a good time to start dropping hints that what I have always wanted is a good drawing of myself done by a courtroom sketch artist. I would prefer that the drawing depict me as I sit triumphant on the witness stand, having just delivered bombshell evidence that will clear a very rich person from the unjust charges of felonious nepotism that threatened their freedom and their entire financial empire.

Of course, in my daydream, the person whose freedom I just delivered looks a lot like Mr Drysdale from the Beverly Hillbillies, and he can't wait to shake my hand as I make my way through the cheering crowd of well-wishers as he introduces me to his exuberant family. 

Mind you, the judge is pounding his gavel, demanding order in the court, but the crowd pays him no mind as the devastated prosecutors gather up their briefs and slink away and "Mr Drysdale" tells me and Peggy that he is having his Alabama-born-and-bred cook whomp up a mess of sausage and gravy and biscuits and hominy, all to be delivered to us in time for breakfast every day for the next six months. 

Just as it happened in The Simpsons, the sketch artist should be French, and say that the sketch, which will be framed in the finest wood and matting that Michael's can offer, is "but a simple charcoal rendering..."  

Listen, I know where this all started. I got so used to seeing the Alex Murdaugh Show every afternoon on cable, and now the series is over and Alex is sporting a drab khaki jumpsuit. I wonder what he's having for breakfast today. 

Guess I'd better go. The cook just got here with mine.

How do you say "Jerk" in German?

From the good people at Volkswagen, who last made the news for rigging their cars to pass emissions tests illegally, this little gem: They have something like OnStar, but they call it Car-Net. Car-Net helps you find your car if it is lost or stolen. It's a paid subscription service, and that's the hangup in this tale.

A sheriff's office in Illinois was trying to track a stolen VW with a 2-year-old boy inside by going onto the Car-Net, but Car-Net said, no, sorry, the owners of that car did not subscribe to our service after their free initial trial period ran out, so no. 

The heck with the toddler, I guess.

"While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen."

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV."  The article continues...

"The detective pleaded, explaining the 'extremely exigent circumstance,' but the representative didn't budge, saying it was company policy.

Ah! Company policy! It is Volkswagen company policy to let people be terrorized with their child in a stolen car while the detective contacts them, gets their credit card number, and reactivates the Car-Net service for a $150 charge?

And that's all it took! As soon as the VW cash register put that yard-and-a-half in their till, the representative gave the police the location of the stolen vehicle, which, in case I failed to mention it, had a two-year-old child in it.

Toyota is a good example of a car manufacturer
that wouldn't charge you $150 if your missing
child is in one of their vehicles.

And as it happens, by the time the police went through this whole silly 30-minute ballet with the car company, the car had been located "by other means."

For their part, Volkswagen called this a "serious breach" of arrangement with the third-party vendor administrating the Car-Net service.

Why, "Volkswagen has a procedure in place with a third-party provider for Car-Net Support Services involving emergency requests from law enforcement. They have executed this process successfully in previous incidents. Unfortunately, in this instance, there was a serious breach of the process. We are addressing the situation with the parties involved," the company huffed in a statement.

So you see! It's not their fault, and they are going to address the situation, probably through several harshly-worded emails and memos with the subject line: ATTENTION ALL PERSONNEL: IMPORTANT POLICY CLARIFICATION.

Because you know that a huge multi-national corporation has better things to do than to worry about an abducted child, with $150 hanging in the balance.

Sunday Rerun: The Real Scoop

 They make so much money up in Vermont, these Ben & Jerry Ice Cream people, that they maintain on their property a fake graveyard where they "bury" the ice cream flavors they have tried and seen fail.

Does any ice cream really sound bad to you? Everybody loves it and everybody basically loves vanilla, and then you add some whatevers, and it's all good.  I really like that Haagen-Dazs Vanilla with Brownie Chunks, in case you're starting your Christmas shopping early.

And who remembers that song "Porcupine Pie" by Neil Diamond? It was a nonsense song about food mixtures like vanilla soup, tutti fruit with fruity blue cheese, and chicken ripple ice cream.

And that might be as good as when Burger King came up with Bacon Ice Cream a couple years ago, and the local ice creameries here in Baltimore that are always coming up with Old Bay Ice Cream.  You never know what people are going to like.

But now you can know what they DON'T like in a cup or cone. These are the Ben & Jerry failures...


1. Schweddy Balls (2011-2011) This was based on the SNL bit featuring Alec Baldwin in the days pre-DT. This was vanilla ice cream with a bit of rum, plus

 fudge-covered rum and malt balls. 

2. Wavy Gravy (1991-2001) This caramel and cashew and Brazil nut flavor and roasted almonds and chocolate hazelnut fudge swirl treat was named for Hugh Romney, the hippie's hippie from Woodstock. 

3. Turtle Soup (2006-2010) tasted like those gooey turtle candies: vanilla fudge covered ice cream with fudge-covered caramels, cashews, and a caramel swirl.

4. Fossil Fuel (2005-2010) had chocolate cookie pieces and fudge dinosaurs, with a fudge swirl. 

5. Miz Jelena's Sweet Potato Pie (1992-1993) Easy to see whythis one only lasted one year. It was ginger ice cream with a fudge swirl. Notice: no sweet potato. I think I spotted the problem.  

6. White Russian (1986-1996) They say it's still available in their scoop shops. It was a collusion of coffee ice cream and Kahlua. 

7. Tuskegee Chunk (1989-1990) was peanut butter ice cream with chocolate chunks. This violated my law of peanut butter, which is that peanut butter must be Skippy and must not come on contact with chocolate for any reason. Sorry, Reese's.

8. Oh Pear (1997-1997) Maybe the French woman you hired to take care of your kids would have like pear ice cream with some almond and a light fudge swirl.

9. Dastardly Mash (1979-1991) Chocolate ice cream with pecans, almonds, chocolate chips, and raisins sounds like a Chunky candy bar. It didn't last as long as the M*A*S*H TV show, though. 

10. Economic Crunch (1987-1987) crashed the world's ice cream shelves soon after the 1987 stock-market crash. It was vanilla with chocolate covered almonds, pecans, and walnuts.

Make mine vanilla, please! Two scoops.

The Saturday Picture Show, March 4, 2023

 

You get the feeling that this Peruvian trombonist waited half of his life for the chance to amuse kids like this, and I'm pretty sure he made the most of his chance. 

I'm guessing this is the Fire Chief in LaVergne and I guess he or she likes to sneak up on fires.

 Nature saves some of its most colorful getups for macaws.

 This week's wallpaper is this Arkansas sunrise.

I am totally impressed by this library and spiral staircase at the Iowa State Capital!

 OK! Here you go - the first spring robin, bob-bob-bobbing along....

I think a lot of people make the mistake of gauging their daily progress against that of others, when it all comes down to doing better than we did yesterday. That's steady progress. 

Someone had the vision to imagine turning a border rock into something much more...and then they made it happen!

 The Corner Pole wishes to say goodbye. Woody like to stay? He sure would.

Way up there in the Pistachio seating area, he's wondering if it would have been worth it to spend a couple more dollars on something closer. On the other hand, if a vendor comes by, he's all set.

Customer Disservice

I don't find the Post Office to be particularly reliable these days, given the amount of times that they do not deliver the mail on our street at all, and the amount of times we get mail intended for people somewhere else in our Zip Code. So when it's time to send our tax information to our friend who does this sort of thing for a living, I am loath to send it via USPS.

For quite a little bit of money (but for the feeling of confidence in the people whose slogan is “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”) I sent it via FedEx. This is not a long ride, where it's going: 13 miles via the Beltway, and 11 miles via air, in case FedEx hired some carrier pigeons. I dropped it off on a Thursday afternoon and the receipt said it would be delivered by the next afternoon.

The middle of the next week, our friend texted to ask where our envelope was. I was not able to speak to a human at FedEx; apparently all their employees were busy losing packages. But over the next 5 days, I was able to track the wayward pack and see it take an amazing trip from Baltimore to White Marsh, MD, to Sparrows Point, MD, to Hagerstown, MD and back to Sparrows Point, and finally it arrived at its intended destination (Pikesville) in a mere 11 (eleven) days. 

Next year, we will drive to where it goes and hand it off personally and still treat ourselves to a nice lunch with what we save in money, not to mention the aggravation (so I won't)

But speaking of lunch, I went to the deli at a supermarket near us - not my usual place, but just needed some ham and cheese for ham and cheese sandwiches. The cheese was not an issue, but when I told the counterman what kind of ham I wanted, he said he couldn't find that brand in his pile of cold cuts or in his walk-in cooler in the back. "No problem," I offered, "there's one right here in the window, all fresh and new." 

This is the best deli ham around,
if you can find someone who will sell it to you.

He said he wasn't allowed to cut that ham until he had sold all the "old-fashioned" ham he had sitting there nearby. I said I wanted the new-fashioned ham and he insisted he could not sell the new ham to me until someone bought all the rest of the old ham.

I told him to send me half a pound, sliced thin, via FedEx. It should be here by Easter.

Auction Action

You probably remember when the new iPhone came out in 2007, because you remember Steve Jobs, head of the Apple orchard, in his black turtleneck and beat-up jeans, striding around the stage, showing off the electronic marvel. 

Sure! A phone that had a PC and a camera and just about everything else, all sized to fit in your pocket. It was The Thing To Have right away

And at the same time, a woman by the name of Karen Green was starting a new job, and her friends figured, what better gift to start her off with than that first-generation iPhone? So they bought her one.

But Ms Green already had a cell phone, not a smart one. It was probably a flip phone. And it was a brand new phone for her and she was happy with her Verizon service contract and did not wish to go with AT&T.

So just like that off-putting chartreuse scarf from Aunt Rozene, the gift stayed in its box.

"I didn't want to get rid of my new [not-smart] phone, and I figured it's an iPhone, so it'll never go out of date," Green told a daytime television program in 2019. Some "expert" on the show told her that her 8GB antique was worth maybe $5,000.

Well. Guess again, because that Price was not Right. Green put that phone up for an online auction recently, and someone paid her $63,356.40 for it. That's over  100 times more than its original cost.

The deal was handled by LCG Auctions out of Lousiana.  They describe the relic as a hot item for electronic collectors and said it "presents magnificently, showcasing sharp corners front and back, rich color, and 'case fresh' features."

Of course, it's hard to find an unused, unopened iPhone because everyone who got one wanted to use it right away.

Now and then you find a story about someone who bought one of the first Ford Mustangs in 1964 and put it away in a barn for safe keeping, only to wind up never driving it for some reason. 

Closest I can come is a Carhartt jacket that a woman at a flea market we go to had bought for her boyfriend just before he dumped her. She sold that coat to me for far less than she had paid for it, just to get it out of her closet and into mine, where it still keeps me warm all these years later.

Let's see an iPhone do that!

  

"You look 'armless!"

Foreign Accent Syndrome might sound like something someone on the writing staff of "Seinfeld" made up, but it is a real thing, defined as "a speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a “foreign” accent." The most frequent cause is not watching too many British shows on PBS, but, rather, damage to the brain from a stroke or TBI (traumatic brain injury). 

Some years ago (12, to be exact) a woman named Karen Butler had dental surgery, and when she came out from under the sedation, she had picked up a pronounced foreign accent. She wasn't fooling around; it was FAS, apparently from  an injury to the part of the brain that controls speech.

Now Ms Butler was born in Illinois and moved out to Oregon with her family as a baby, and she had never been to Europe at all, but suddenly she sounded English/Irish/slightly European. Just from having a couple of teeth removed.

And this is far different from cases like that of entertainer Madonna, who belied her Michigan roots by spending a week in England and suddenly trying to talk like Helen Mirren. 

"I just went to sleep and I woke up and my mouth was all sore and swollen, and I talked funny.  And the dentist said, 'You'll talk normal when the swelling goes down,' " Butler reported.

When the swelling went away, the foreign affect in her speech did not. Neurologist Ted Lowenkopf, director of the Providence Stroke Center in Portland, told her it was indeed FAS.

Most people who see this picture can "hear" Ricky in their mind, speaking with his accent!

Foreign Accent Syndrome was first reported in the 1940s. You may have heard of a Norwegian woman who was hit by German shrapnel in World War II and later developed a pronounced German accent. Most cruelly, she was was ostracized by friends and family as a result.

Strokes and other forms of brain trauma usually cause major brain damage that leave truly staggering speech problems, but Lowenkopf says with FAS, only a small part of the brain, that which concerns vocal patterns and intonations, is affected.

Doctors told Ms Butler she may have suffered a small stroke while she was under anesthesia, but only a brain scan would say that for sure, and her insurance wouldn't cover one.

I used to enjoy going to new grocery stores and asking for a certain item by using a French accent just to see the reaction of the clerks whom I asked. Most often, they would raise their voice while saying "Aisle 5, sir!" in the apparent belief that if I were foreign, I was also partly hard of hearing.

I hear fine. Just enjoying my life here.